


Romantic Apocalypses

by weekend_conspiracy_theorist



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Angst, F/M, M/M, it does end upbeat, major character deaths all occur before the fic starts, sort of, themes of suicide and violence, this is not a happy fic, zombies but Eve won't call them that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 10:37:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2769941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weekend_conspiracy_theorist/pseuds/weekend_conspiracy_theorist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eve Moneypenny sits on a roof, regrets that the apocalypse ever happened, and wonders if it'd be worth it to give up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Romantic Apocalypses

**Author's Note:**

> Currently stuck on the novel-length fic I'm writing, and so this happened. I'm sorry.
> 
> I own nothing to do with the Bond franchise, and the title is almost that of a very nice webcomic written by the very talented Vitaly S. Alexius. (The fic otherwise has nothing to do with said webcomic and neither do I.)

The day begins to dawn, golds and reds and oranges strewn across the sky like paint thrown across a canvas. It’s weak light, the kind that leaves everything it touches cold and grey in spite of the beauty of the sky.

 

It’s the kind of morning that leads to remembrances.

 

Eve remembers a tall black woman with impeccable lipstick and impossible heels shoving a young girl out of the way of a runaway truck on the very first day of the apocalypse, only to get hit herself. There’s also a skinny boffin with coke bottle glasses and a dry voice and a dead-man’s switch in his hand, calmly telling the agents to get their arses out of there if they know what’s good for them. Then a blue-eyed double oh with berserker’s rage taking out entire swaths of the undead (it felt far too silly to call them zombies) before nodding kindly for her to take the headshot as he bleeds from a dozen different bites. Next, a chief of staff with a receding hairline diving into the channel to save a drowning child and never coming back out.

 

Eve dangles her legs off the side of the building, feeling her chest ache and her eyes burn with tears she’ll never let herself shed. That would make it _real_ that nearly everyone she’s ever loved is dead, and Eve is relatively certain that her tentative grip on sanity is partially stemming from the idea that this is all some gory, surreal nightmare from which she’ll wake screaming.

 

In that case, she’d go back to work at Six like it was nothing strange, because nightmares happened thrice a week in her profession so it really _wasn’t_ at all odd. She’d taunt James and coddle Q and flirt with Alec and commiserate with Tanner, and when she got home she’d call her sister even though she normally only ever did that once a month. They’d meet for coffee.

 

She’d let Alec take her out for a proper drink, rather than meeting him back at his place to shag and smoke cigars on the balcony.

 

She’d make M take a night off once in a while.

 

She’d make Q and James get their shit together.

 

She’d—God. She’d do it all if she could just have the chance.

 

She tilts her head back, closing her eyes, and wishes the sun were bright enough for her to _feel it_ , warm on her dark skin and comforting like the touch of a lover. She does have one of those, still. Alec is around, somewhere in the building below her.

 

But it’s… it’s not the same. Eve just wants to be able to close her eyes and pretend she’s on vacation somewhere and she can’t do that without the sun because god forbid she let Alec take her somewhere cold. It was… that was the only rule she had given him when they first started their… She saw enough bleak on the job, alright? If she was ever going to go somewhere with him, there had best be a beach and preferably a nude one.

 

There’s a feather light touch at her shoulder and she opens her eyes to Alec’s shaggy blonde hair and green eyes and wide smile—he doesn’t beam _quite_ the way he used to and his moods are less mercurial because d e a t h and d e s t r u c t i o n feel less like a game when survival is the best they can hope for. But he’s still Alec and that’s good because she still needs him to make crass jokes and talk about fire like it’s his favorite sibling the way a heroin addict needs their next fix.

 

“Any Jehova's Witnesses show up?” he asks, because he likes to act like the things scratching at their door in the night are something other than the dead, carnivorous versions of the citizens they used to protect with their lives.

 

“Pastafarians this time,” she tells him, because she likes to _act_ like she likes to act like the things she’s shooting down with a sniper rifle are something other than the dead, carnivorous versions of the citizens they used to protect with their lives.

 

“Can’t believe I missed it,” he tells her with a dramatic sigh and he plops down to sit next to her. Their thighs aren’t quite touching but they might as well be, and when he leans back on the heels of his hands his pinky finger covers hers.

 

She wishes they were kids in high school discovering sex for the first time and that this was scary and new. She wishes she was buzzing with tension and excitement and waiting breathlessly for him to make the first move or for herself to get the courage instead. She wishes they weren’t a broken ex-assassin and ex-secretary needing benign physical contact to stay sane as they sat on a roof in a London on an Earth where everyone was either dead, undead, or destined to become one or the other just as soon as they stopped bothering to fight tooth and nail.

 

This is literally impossible to recover from. She remembers Q telling her that, voice broken and glasses discarded and skinny limbs and spine bent in on themselves. She doesn’t remember his reasoning or the science or anything else he might have said that night, but she remembers what was important. That there was no cure, that there could be no cure, that everything was utterly hopeless and—and she remembers that it was about two days after that that he decided the only way to save the rest of them was to sacrifice himself. She figures the two events were pretty indelibly linked.

 

She figures he was pretty selfish to do it that way, but she can’t really blame him either.

 

(She does blame James, for making her either pull the trigger or watch him turn into one of them, but that wasn’t the first time she’d shot him and she’d do it again if he ever needed her to. Not that that's at all possible.)

 

“Just let me know when you’re ready to stop,” Eve tells Alec, like she does every morning. They decided a long time ago that it was both of them or neither of them because survival wouldn’t mean anything in solitude.

 

“Just tell me when you want me to be,” Alec responds, like he does every morning.

 

The sky is beginning to fade into London’s typical uniform grey. Eve slides her hand more fully under his and swings her legs idly. There’s a group of undead moving down the street towards their building and there’s smoke rising somewhere in the distance, but her sniper rifle is on the other side of the roof and frankly she suspects Alec is enjoying the faint tang of smoke carried to them on the wind.

 

Eve wonders if they’re both ready to stop fighting but too scared to admit it. She wonders if their motives matter, when they’re both still willing to fight if the other is too.

 

When he shifts just slightly to press his shoulder against hers, she decides they probably don’t. This is a morning for remembrances, and right now Eve Moneypenny wants to remember what it feels like to kiss Alec Trevelyan.


End file.
